1. Technical Field
The disclosure relates to a single-image-based rain streak removal method and apparatus.
2. Related Art
Nowadays, with growing affluence in our lives, vehicles are becoming more and more popular. In addition to the continuous progress on power, the improvement on safety during driving is another subject that needs to be focused in developing the vehicle technology. Many vision-based safety warning systems warn a driver to keep a safe distance by recognizing obstacles in the captured image. However, such systems often fail to work properly in bad weather such as heavy rain, because it blurs the texture of the appearance of lanes, traffic signs or obstacles such as pedestrians or vehicles in the captured image, and, as a result, a lot of bad recognition results may occur. It is very dangerous for the driver to drive under such driving environments.
There are currently a variety of methods that can determine whether it is raining based on an image of the windshield or an image outside the car. However, these methods are used only as a basis for determining whether to automatically activate rain wipers and do not perform any processing to the image itself. Many relevant studies have shown that these methods can be only used in images having a static background because these methods must rely on a streak's relative movement between a previous image and a later image in a video to infer whether it is raining.